Don't Ever Change (18 page)

“Who cares?” Booth says, grinning.

“Well, please don’t tell anyone, okay, Booth? Promise? Pinkie swear, promise?”

“You sound like one of your campers.”

“To me that’s a compliment,” I say, and fold my arms.

“Chill,” Booth says. “I’m not going to tell.”

“Thanks.”

“C’mon,” he says, motioning to the cars.

“Totally,” I say, but don’t move.

In high school, which I admit was basically five minutes ago, a gaggle of girls who might or might not like me wasn’t too intimidating. I had my own friends and we had our own
thing
and part of that thing was making fun of everyone, and that felt really solid, really stable. The trick was to exist somewhere between the Bully and the Bullied, and that somewhere was Above It All. There’s TGIF and then there’s TGFI: Too Good For It. But every day was TGFI,
four years
of TGFI, which is part of the Roush Problem and the Overlooking/Underestimating Foster Problem, and probably most of the other problems too.

But this isn’t high school, and I
am
intimidated.

“Nobody’ll find out about you and Foster,” Booth says. “C’mon, we’re a
grreat grroup
,” he says, doing this lame goofy voice, which shows I’m not the only one who’s noticed Steven’s a dork.

“Seriously, Eva,” Booth says, actually serious. “You don’t talk to anyone. You don’t even really talk to
Foster
.” He raises his eyebrows suggestively.

“Ignorance is a blister,” my father always jokes, then taps me on the forehead and goes, “Pop!” It’s dumb, but he’s right; I need to know a lot more before I act so
superior
. And I really wouldn’t mind making another friend at camp—and not just Alyssa, who’d probably
pbbth
if she heard me call her a friend. So this is definitely a GTFI moment: Good Time For Improvement.

“I’ll hang out by the cars,” I say stiffly. “Let’s go hang out.”

“Convincing,” Booth says, unconvinced, and grabs my hand.

When we walk over, he introduces everyone (Jules, TJ, Kit, Nick, Melly, Amanda, Seth) and then there’s a heavy silence like I interrupted some moment, even though no one was talking when we got there. I don’t know what to do, so I just say, “Did you guys hear about Brandon Gettis?”

“Yeah,” Melly says, and that’s it.

No one else says anything. To seem more natural, I start fishing my keys out of my bag but then wonder if that seems rude.

“You don’t eat the cookies and milk when I pass them out after swim,” Jules says, facing me. “You’re like the only one.”

“I’m vegan. So . . . that’s why.”

“Do you eat eggs?” Melly asks.

“Eggnorance is bliss,” I say.

“What about eggplant parmesan?”

“No, because it’s got—”

“Not even a little chicken?” Seth asks.

“Why do you think they call it
fowl
?” I say.

“That’s really funny,” Jules says, and it sounds like she means it, but she’s not laughing.

“You should come to Nick’s,” Amanda says.

“When, now?”

“For the party,” TJ says. “Counselors only.”

“You don’t have to say ‘counselors only,’” Nick says. “I think she knows the kids aren’t invited.”

They all look at me.

“I know that,” I assure them, with a nod and a smile.

“It’s this Friday,” Nick tells me.

“Should I bring anyone?”

“It’s counselors only,” TJ says again, and everyone laughs.

“Fun,” I say. “Fun, fun, fun,” I keep saying, until it seems real.

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I LEAVE A
desperate message on Michelle’s voice mail insisting she hang out with me later, and then I call Steph and beg her to help convince Michelle. Usually I’m more discreet about manipulations like these, but today I’m too worked up. Courtney overhears and shakes her head. She’s perched on a bar stool in the kitchen, casually flipping through
LA Yoga
magazine.

“Are you shaking your head at yoga or at me?” I ask.

“Guess,” she says, not looking up.

“Things are getting
unusual
,” I say.

“That sounds mild.”

“My best friends don’t even like me anymore. It’s real, it’s happening.”

“You don’t seem very devastated.”

“That’s because I’m
overwhelmed
.”

“With camp?” Courtney says.

“With camp, exactly.”

“Why, what happened at camp?”

My sister has an endless reserve of wisdom but not an endless reserve of patience. I learned this for the first time five years ago, when I started coming to Courtney for advice about all my high-stakes eighth-grade crises. Courtney always told me precisely what to do, as well as how and when to do it; Dad called her Court-throat and would leave the room whenever she launched into Life Coach mode. The difference was that Courtney hadn’t taught herself to
let go
back then; she hadn’t discovered how to self-therapize. She was actually more like I am now—while I was even
more
immature and helpless, if that’s possible.

“Here’s what happened at camp,” I say, sighing, prepping myself.

Our dynamic used to be that I would just unload on Courtney—everything times everything, the conflicts and the contexts and the personalities involved—and then she’d process the situation for a moment, think it over, and lay out a hard-line verdict:
Don’t ever call her again
, or,
Turn in the paper anyway
. It was a Give a Man a Fish type of thing; Courtney carefully instructed me how a thirteen-year-old girl should behave, but I never absorbed the lesson because I was too fixated on just getting the answer. And that’s all that I want from her right now: the Right Answer.

“Foster and I kissed,” I say. “For a
while
.”

“Uh-huh, and?”

“And then we got caught. By another counselor.”

“So are you in trouble?”

I shrug.

“How was the kissing?” she asks.

“Amazing,” I say. “He had his hands against my back and pushed up and down my spine like a massage.”

“Reiki,” Courtney says.

“I think it was just regular pressing.”

“When he had his hands on your back, did it feel this life-force energy was flowing between you?”

“Maybe,” I say.

“And did you feel, like, a glowing radiance when he stopped?”

“Okay, I guess you’re right, I guess it was Reiki,” I say.

This gives me an idea for a new story. Two sisters grow up with this secret power: they can heal people with their touch. They can’t cure diseases exactly, it’s not like that, it’s more like they can provide this calm or relief, the feeling of the Right Answer a person’s been searching for. But as the sisters grow older, they become lazier with their power, and eventually, since they don’t work on refining it, they lose it completely. But even after the power’s gone, they keep on touching people, pressing on strangers’ arms and shoulders and spines with their palms, pretending they can heal. I can’t tell if the story should ultimately have them being uncovered as frauds or if it’s more just about the sisters trying to rekindle their lost power, but maybe a cool, sort of heavy way to end it would be during one of their sessions:
Do you feel that? No. Well do you feel this? No, I don’t feel a thing.

There’s a pen and paper on the counter, but I don’t write it down.

“I like Foster,” Courtney tells me.

“I like Foster too.”

“I like Elliot too, though, and I also like Michelle and Steph. I like Shelby. But I like you the most,” she says, making a sweet face. “
Especially
when you wear your glasses, which lately is basically never.”

“So you like everyone?” I ask.

“I do,” my sister says. “That’s the whole point. Liking people is easy, Eva.”

“Easy for you,” I say.

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MICHELLE AND STEPH
don’t show up till eight, which gives me the whole afternoon to redecorate my room into an elaborate flashback museum, with everything the three of us used to love arranged in an elaborate pile on the carpet. Their eyes widen when they walk in.

“This is . . . a lot of stuff,” Michelle says, clearly weirded out.

“What’s this all doing here?” Steph asks, confused.

Looking at it through their eyes, I see it totally differently now, like I’ve set up a yard sale full of our memories. And nobody’s buying any of it. Michelle toes a stack of
Teen Vogue
magazines with the tip of her shoe. Steph grimaces when she notices the hideous sweater we all puffy-painted sophomore year.

“Never mind,” I say nervously, and force a laugh. “Forget all that, just sit down.”

“Michelle lost her job,” Steph blurts out.

“Steph!” Michelle says.

“You lost your job?” I ask. “Like you were
laid off
?”

“It’s not a factory, Eva,” Michelle says. “They weren’t making, like, cutbacks or something.”

“She got fired,” Steph whispers.

“From the jewelry thing,” I say.

“Don’t say
jewelry thing
,” Michelle says. “I was a personal assistant.”

“I’m in trouble at work, too,” I say.

“Oh,
please
, Eva, tell us about
that
,” Steph says sarcastically, and then Michelle says, “Yeah, Eva, please?” in a genuinely mocking way.

I guess I understand the hostility, but not this ganging-upness, because that’s never how it’s been between us, even when it’s been bad. Before this sour summer I can barely recall a specific time when the two of them came to a decision without me; sometimes I’d walk out of the bathroom at school, having only been gone a couple minutes, and find them sitting in silence like two strangers, picking dirt out of their fingernails, scrolling through text messages. How long have I been in the bathroom
this
time? What changed?

“My job,” I say, searching for the right words, “is kind of harder than I thought it’d be. It’s, like,”—just then I notice the family Dustbuster over in the corner of my room, above which my mother’s stuck a neon Post-it scrawled with the words,
REMEMBER ME!?!??
—“
sucking up
a lot more of my time than I thought it would.”

Michelle and Steph exchange eye rolls.

“Typical,” Michelle says, annoyed. “Eva the Hypocrite.”

“That’s offensive,” I tell her. “I may be a hypocrite, but I’m not typical.”

“Whatever,” Steph says. “Ever notice how you’re the one who’s most clingy and anxious about things changing—”

“And you lean on us super hard when you feel like it—” Michelle cuts in.

“And make us do all these pinkie swears that we’re not going to lose touch—”

“But you couldn’t be nice through one dumb dinner with two totally nice people, and then it was just one dumb party—and you don’t even
like
Kerry, you actually really don’t—”

“Not to mention,” Steph says, getting even more worked up, “you wouldn’t have come anyway! You
know
you wouldn’t have, Eva. And even if randomly you did, you would’ve been so
crappy
to everyone, like you were to Bart and Miranda. Like you were to us because we
like
Bart and Miranda.”

“We tried not to be mad.”

“Because being mad at you never works, because you always win, because you’re so smart—which is really not as good a look on you as you’d like to think.”

“But we
were
mad,” Michelle says.

“But no one can be mad at
Eva
, because she punishes you for it,” Steph says, glaring.

“Because one day later it’s like,
poof
”—Michelle mimics an imaginary smoke bomb exploding in her hands—“‘if you’re gonna have a problem with me, forget you guys.’”

“No, no, no,” I say, reeling from the outpouring, “that’s not what happened. I was just trying to . . . get ahead of the problem.”